Miesha Tate upset by implication she turned down rematch with Ronda Rousey

When bantamweight star Ronda Rousey was officially introduced last week as a member of the UFC’s roster, head honcho Dana White explained Rousey would meet Liz Carmouche in her Octagon debut after a number of other opponents turned down the opportunity. One of the names lumped into that group was Miesha Tate, a former Strikeforce champion sporting a well-documented personal rivalry with Rousey.

However, according to Tate, she was never offered a shot at revenge via rematch, and she’s not happy she was labeled in such a manner.

“I was never presented with that. I had made it clear that I wanted to take some time off after my last win over Julie Kedzie, but that doesn’t mean you don’t make an exception to the rule when something like that is presented. Clearly when I made those statements, that was before women were coming to the UFC for sure. That was before it be would an opportunity to headline. That was before it would an opportunity to make history,” said an animated Tate on The MMA Hour. “If they would have said, ‘Hey, you want to fight Ronda in the UFC? You want to headline a UFC card for the first fight in history for women?’ I would have been like, hell yeah. But it wasn’t offered to me.”

Tate also pointed out the source of her anger was unrelated to the title-shot not coming her way but rather the manner in which things were handled.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t get offered the fight, because I’m okay with earning the rematch. I’m okay with working my way back up there and really feeling like I deserve that position. I’m fine with that,” explained Tate. “But I’m not okay with Ronda saying that I’m basically afraid to fight her and that I turned that fight down, and that she thinks it’s funny that happened. Because it never happened.”

With heat returning to the feud between Tate and Rousey, it looks like fans should be treated to another tilt between the two in 2013. The 26-year old “Cupcake” is considered to be one of the top women in MMA with an overall record of 13-3 and wins over the likes of Zoila Gurgel, Hitomi Akano, and Marloes Coenen.

It is shitty that Dana and Ronda both said that Tate was asked and she turned it down. Then someone called DW on it on twitter and he admited that they never even asked her because she got ‘smashed’ by Ronda recently so why would they ask her? Which is fine, but don’t say that she turned the fight down when you purposely didn’t ask in the first place.